KABUL, Afghanistan — Insurgents launched a brazen pre-dawn assault Wednesday against the giant U.S.-run Bagram Air Field one day after a suicide bomber struck a U.S. convoy in the capital of Kabul, killing 18 people. The Kabul dead included five American troops and a Canadian and was the deadliest attack on NATO in the Afghan capital in eight months.

The back-to-back attacks appeared part of a Taliban offensive that the insurgents announced earlier this month – even as the U.S. and its partners prepare for a major operation to restore order in the turbulent south. The insurgent attacks against both the capital and a major American military installation show the militants are prepared to strike at the heart of the U.S.-led mission.

On Tuesday, the toll of American dead in Afghanistan passed 1,000, after a suicide bomb in Kabul killed at least five United States service members. Having taken nearly seven years to reach the first 500 dead, the war killed the second 500 in fewer than two. A resurgent Taliban active in almost every province, a weak central government incapable of protecting its people and a larger number of American troops in harms way all contributed to the accelerating pace of death.

I'd heard that the Taliban was diminished in Afghanistan and wasn't going to pose that much of a threat to American troops and our NATO allies. In fact, you know who it was the told me that? It was Rep. Joe Sestak, the new Democratic nominee for U.S. Senate:

Success is attainable: In Afghanistan, our goal is not ideal democracy but simply conditions that will be inhospitable to al Qaeda after we depart. The Taliban we face there are not the 250,000-man insurrection that defeated the Soviet Union. The Taliban's Afghan forces number only about 20,000, and most of those are mercenaries.

Those fighting for a wage or because of political alliances can be brought in from the battlefield. Those ideologically committed -- roughly 6,000 in Afghanistan -- can be defeated.

We've haven't learned nearly enough about Sestak, but we have seen that the former admiral is a guy who tends to lower his head and keep charging forward. But on Afghanistan, it's time for Sestak to change course. There's a truism that generals -- and admirals, I guess -- always re-fight the last war. In the case of Afghanistan, the war's been going on so long that we're foolishly fighting the same war but now as it should have been waged in 2002.

It's been nine years -- our (not funny, Mr. President) Predator drones and killing of civilians is creating a new generation of anti-Americans, making Sestak's numbers irrelevant. And we know now what we didn't know then, which is that the government that our troops are risking their lives for, the Karzai government, is hopelessly corrupt. The national attention that Sestak is receiving, and his military resume, give the Democrat an opportunity here to rethink our Afghan policy, but I'm not optimistic.

And you know what's even scarier? The Republican nominee for Senate, Pat Toomey. He's not only supportive of our direction in Afghanistan but he sees what's happening there as an excuse for getting tough on Iran, without any specifics of how plans to do that:

It is in that spirit of bipartisan national security policy that I offer the following constructive advice to President Obama regarding a threat to American interests that is equal to, if not greater than, that posed by the Taliban, namely the radical and aggressive regime in Iran.

Arlen Specter loomed larger than life over the primaries, but the primaries are over now, and Specter is gone. It's time to focus on the issues, and the quaint idea that new leaders can come up with a new approach to a war that right now isn't making a whole lot of sense.